Project description:The aim of the study was to carry out a CGH study utilizing a set of 39 diverse Bacillus isolates. Thirty four B. cereus and five B. anthracis strains and isolates were chosen so as to represent different lineages based on previous characterizations, including MLEE and MLST (Helgason, Okstad et al. 2000; Helgason, Tourasse et al. 2004). They represent the spectrum of B. cereus phenotypic diversity by including soil, dairy and periodontal isolates in addition to virulent B. anthracis strains.
Project description:Helicobacter pylori, which is known as pathogens of various gastric diseases, have many types of genome sequence variants. That is part of the reason why pathogenesis and infection mechanisms of the H. pylori-driven gastric diseases have not been well clarified yet. Here we performed a large-scale proteome analysis to profile the heterogeneity of the proteome expression of 7 H. pylori strains by using LC/MS/MS-based proteomics approach combined with a customized database consisting of non-redundant tryptic peptide sequences derived from full genome sequences of 52 H. pylori strains. The non-redundant peptide database enabled us to identify more peptides in the database search of MS/MS data, compared with a simply merged protein database. Using the approach we performed proteome analysis of genome-unknown strains of H. pylori in as large-scale as genome-known ones. Clustering of the H. pylori strains using the proteome profiling slightly differed from the genome profiling and more clearly divided the strains into two groups based on the isolated area. Furthermore, we also identified phosphorylated proteins and sites of the H. pylori strains and obtained phosphorylation motif located in the N-terminus, which are commonly observed in bacteria.
Project description:Five batch cultures of Bacillus subtilis were subjected to laboratory evolution for 6,000 generations under conditions repressing sporulation in complex liquid medium containing glucose. Between 1,000 and 2,000 generations, variants with a distinct small-colony morphology arose and swept through four of the five populations. To understand the nature of adaptation in these variants, individual strains were isolated from one population before (WN715) and after (WN716) the sweep. In addition to colony morphology, strains WN715 and WN716 differed in their motility, aerotaxis, and cell morphology. Competition experiments of WN715 vs. WN716 showed that WN716 had gained a distinct fitness advantage during growth and the transition to stationary phase, which was more pronounced when WN715 was present in co-culture. Microarray analyses revealed candidate genes in which mutations may have produced some of the observed phenotypes.
Project description:Genome engineering offers the possibility to create completely novel cell factories with enhanced properties for biotechnological application. In recent years, the possibilities for genome engineering have been extensively explored in the Gram-positive bacterial cell factory Bacillus subtilis, where up to 42% of the genome, encoding dispensable functions has been removed. Such studies have shown that some strains with minimized genomes gained beneficial features, for instance in protein production. However, strains with the most minimal genomes also showed particular growth defects. This has focused our attention on strains with less extensive genome deletions that show close-to-wild-type growth properties, while retaining the acquired beneficial traits in secretory protein production of strains lacking larger genomic segments. A strain of the latter category is B. subtilis IIG-Bs27-47-24, here referred to as midiBacillus II, which lacks 30.95% of the parental genome. To date, it was unknown how the altered genomic configuration of midiBacillus II impacts on cell physiology at large, and protein secretion in particular. Therefore, the present study was aimed at bridging this knowledge gap through an in-depth proteomics analysis with special focus on protein secretion stress responses. Interestingly, the results show that the secretion stress response of midiBacillus II as elicited by high-level expression of a staphylococcal antigen is completely different from the secretion stress responses that occur in the parental strain 168. This implies that high-level protein secretion has different implications for wild-type and genome-engineered Bacillus strains, dictated by the altered genomic and proteomic configurations.
Project description:AtxA, the master virulence regulator of Bacillus anthracis, regulates the expression of three toxins that are required for the pathogenicity of Bacillus anthracis. Recent transcriptome analyses also showed that AtxA affects a large number of genes on both chromosome and plasmid, suggesting its role as a global regulator. Its mechanism of gene regulation nor binding target in vivo was, however, not well understood. In this work, we conducted ChIP-seq for cataloging binding sites of AtxA in vivo and Cappable-seq for catalogging the transcription start sites on the B. anthracis genome. For detected regulons, single knockout strains were constructed and RNA-seq was conducted for each strain.